


Ad Infinitum

by rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:00:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25487392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: "He will always have this effect on her, she thinks, even after the sun explodes, even after they are nothing more than a collection of atoms, of fragment and rock and ageless, unfinished things. They will always know each other like this."A humble offering: Lauren and Kieran experience an uncomplicated Sunday morning.
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 23
Kudos: 129





	Ad Infinitum

**Author's Note:**

> "Watching you dancing in the kitchen, I could call you my new religion..."
> 
> Someone asked me if I listen to music while I write. The answer is no, not usually. But this piece, I think, is best read while listening to New Religion by The Heydaze, preferably the acoustic version. Also, Bloom by The Paper Kites.

She’s at her best when she thinks that no one is watching. 

At half-past nine, tentative winter sun slants in and scatters rainbow prisms, rendering her something cosmic, like far-off mirages, like a song you forgot you knew until you hear it again and it sounds just like the first time. She’s at her best bathed in liquid gold, wearing one of his rumpled dress shirts, cuffed at the elbows and falling over her like waves of milk. Exactly like this, with a song on her lips and flour in her hands. And then he’s falling in love with her again, and he will ask her to marry him, and she’ll laugh and say that they’ve already done that. 

This is how they live, now, in perpetuity, in a wealth of tomorrows neither of them expected to stumble upon. At first, it feels strange - he doesn’t expect to find solace in the gentle cadence of days, tipped ceaselessly into one another like falling dominoes, ad infinitum. He doesn’t expect to feel joy without guilt, and even still, some days are worse than others. And because she loves him — even the untold, complicated, unforgivable parts — she knows how to translate the long shadows on his face, that ever-hungry winter. She understands that on some days (the very worst ones) he will fall quiet, that he will lock himself in his drawing room or slip away for long, solitary walks across the city only to return at dusk and fall wordlessly into her, arms unfolding, palms unclean. And she loves him still. _She loves him still._

He’d marry her every day, forever, if he could. 

“Wait,” he calls to her from the doorway. “Don’t move.” But she moves anyway, ever-obstinate. Twists her neck around and says, “But I’ve got flour all over me.”

“Let me just get a photo of you, you stubborn girl.” 

“I’m not wearing _pants,_ Kieran.” 

“Yes,” he replies. “Precisely.” 

And then she’ll concede, and he’ll say, “No, stand exactly as you were before. With the sunlight there, just like that.” There’s something about her profile when she’s photographed candidly that plays with the aperture like an answer to a prayer. He never uses reference photos when he’s drawing, prefers to let the edges of his memory soften the charcoal in the recreation. But there’s something about his wife _(his wife, his wife)_ that he feels desperate to preserve in time, like a moth in resin, like fragile, fossilized bone. 

Today, neither of them have anywhere in particular to be. There is only this: the quiet hum of music the next room over, the scratch of needle against vinyl. The hiss and pop of pancakes on the stove-top and his exceptionally beautiful wife making them. She’s not much of a cook (she is, after all, noble-born, and never had to concern herself with such things). The pancakes will be a little burnt on the bottom, a little misshapen, but they’ll be the best he’s ever eaten because he is eating them with her, in the apartment that they share, on a none too special Sunday in winter. 

He slides up behind her and grips her hips where they dimple a little, his fingertips curled around her soft skin. 

“Good morning, _mon amour,_ ” he murmurs into the dip of her neck. She hisses when he presses his lips there, feather-light. He will always have this effect on her, she thinks, even after the sun explodes, even after they are nothing more than a collection of atoms, of fragment and rock and ageless, unfinished things. They will always know each other like this. 

She turns, closed in on either side by the cage of his arms against the counter. “Good morning, subordinate,” she breathes. He threads his fingers through her auburn hair, twisted into a knot at the base of her neck with a white ribbon. 

“I love you in this,” he says, pulling at the hem of his shirt where it falls above her knee. He’s danced with women wearing ball gowns worth more than his life several times over, and still they have never made an effect quite so resonant as Lauren White in his rumpled button down. She lifts his palm to her lips and her warm breath washes over his knuckles.

“It reminds me of-”

“Yes,” Kieran replies. “I wanted to kiss you that day.” 

Lauren huffs, incredulous. “You did not.” A shadow passes over her expression as she sifts through her memory to a different day, long ago. Their first night together, but only on a technicality, really, as they slept in separate rooms.

“I think I would know, _mon amour._ Besides,” he lifts his knuckles from her mouth and trails them along the curve of her jaw. “You can tell that I’m not lying.” 

“There’s no way you wanted to kiss me that day. We hardly knew each other. We _hated_ each other.”

“Only you,” Kieran replies, “Obstinate wife of mine, would attempt to argue me out of my own memory.” The song on the record player changes to a lilting, syrupy number, gentle croons that bounce off of the scuffed floorboards, sweet enough to chase away the ghosts, if only for a little while. They wordlessly melt into one another, because this is how they have always communicated — in shades of meaning, not so much counterparts of one another, but extensions of the same symphony. She dusts his shoulders with flour as he spins her around the kitchen, passing them through the light like dust motes.

“And, for the record,” he dips her now, and those eyes - heaven-sent, everything in excess - slide into view from her vantage point upside-down. “I never hated you. I envied you.” He lifts her to his chest and leans in to kiss the hollow of her throat, the way he wanted to do so many nights ago. “I envied your honesty. Your goodness.”

“Kieran-”

“Don’t,” he murmurs. He smiles wanly, and it’s a fragile thing, thin as a paper crane. “I know what I am, Lauren.”

“Were,” she corrects harshly. “What you were. They _stole you_ , Kieran. You were a child.”

“I’ll spend every day of my life trying to deserve you.” Kieran cups her face in his palms and looks at her, sapphire on gold. “And the next lifetime as well, in the event that you’d try to shoot me in an alleyway in that one, too.” 

“I would hope I wouldn’t have to,” Lauren replies, the edges of her grin folding a little under his palms. He spins her again, and everything blurs, save for the center of gravity — his eyes, blue, blue, blue. “Maybe we’d be different people. You, an artist-”

“-A doctor, I think.”

“Really?” 

_“Oui._ I might try saving people, for a change,” he hums. “But you, my dear,” he presses a kiss to her cheek, her nose, her brow. Teasing, the way he always has: withholding the thing because the promise of the thing tastes so much sweeter. Drawing close and then pulling back, like a fox to its prey, like a sun to its horizon. Her eyes fall shut, breath hitched in anticipation, chin tipped forward just so. 

“You would always be the same.” He kisses her lips now, soft and kneading, tasting of coffee and peppermint — it’s a kiss they’ve had a million times, but different, too. Each a new iteration, a different imagining.

“In any lifetime.”

**Author's Note:**

> Well, this was just delightfully self-indulgent, no? 
> 
> This fandom has been through quite a bit with these two. I wanted to offer something simple and sweet, as unrealistic as it may be :) It should also be noted that this imagining of simp Kieran pays homage to the incomparable thumbipeach, because honestly, if you had Lauren, wouldn't you worship at her altar too?


End file.
